


Hardly Feel the Sun

by Miss_M



Category: Sicario (2015)
Genre: Catharsis, Choices, F/M, Post-Canon, Power Dynamics, Power Play, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-06
Updated: 2016-10-06
Packaged: 2018-08-19 21:36:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,866
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8225494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: Alejandro got to her. So Kate vowed that one day she’d get him.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Any mistakes related to law enforcement and geography are mine, mostly prompted by plot convenience. Title is from “Daylight” by Chicane. I own nothing.

Kate’s palms are sweating. The A/C is blasting, of course, the damp patches around her armpits are turning ice-cold before they dry. She rubs her palms against her pant legs, flaps her hands discreetly in the cool, dry air, checks her watch. 

Kate has had four years to prepare herself for this moment. She has thought about it so much, she gets why Reggie accused her of turning obsessed, back when he was still talking to her. Of course she’s obsessed, if that’s even the right word: what does one call it when everything one knew gets ripped apart and then thrust back into one’s bleeding hands, so one can neither move on nor lay it down and begin to forget? 

Before and after Juarez, that’s how she’s come to consider her life. Kate has done the whole fucking song and dance: the counseling, the anti-anxiety medication ( _she’s still on that_ ), the drunken binges and bar fights and casual sex with strangers who let her handcuff them to the bed as well as not-so-strangers who didn’t ( _and now Reggie is no longer talking to her_ ), more counseling, smoking, not smoking, running five miles every day, lying on her couch for days eating crap and watching TV. These days she smokes and jogs regularly, she still has the odd drink but always stops at two. After she got back from paid leave, she leveraged her experience with Matt Graver’s highly effective, by-the-book, so-called taskforce into a transfer to the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, then started volunteering for every single, godforsaken, high-expectations, low-outcomes taskforce in the border area, with the Marshals, the DEA, whomever. She’s practically on permanent loan to the Marshals now. She’s planned it all out. Once she could get out of bed without crying or smoking an entire pack of cigarettes in one go, and regained her clarity, she could see the most likely outcome and prepared herself for it. 

Kate’s obsession has kept her going, honed her for this, this day, this place. A bare, impersonal room in an Albuquerque police station, with the A/C blasting and the dipping sun dyeing the street outside a soft, reassuring pink. Looks like a dentist’s waiting room, but the window is bulletproof and the door has an electronic keypad. 

Kate would have a shot at getting the men who were _really_ responsible for the Chandler house of horrors, Graver told her. So if she’s being completely honest with herself, it’s Matt Graver that Kate should be gunning for, but she’s learned to adjust her expectations since Juarez. Matt Graver, ‘DOD advisor,’ was well-nigh untouchable. Matt Graver, special advisor to the Deputy Director of the CIA, who probably pairs his new, sharp suits with flip-flops, whose face appears in national newspapers and whose expertise on ties between terrorist groups and the drug trade is considered beyond reproach – that Matt Graver is also forever beyond Kate’s reach. 

She hopes to hell Matt is bored stiff in his new job and unable to get out of it, that all his options have been hijacked by other interests for once. Imprisoned in boardrooms, having to ‘yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir’ to the President and the CIA Director whenever they happen to need him. It’s the only kind of suffering Kate can imagine for Matt, which he wouldn’t slither his way out of: the only satisfaction she’s going to get where Matt’s concerned. 

Then again, it wasn’t Matt who got to Kate during Juarez, not really. It wasn’t Matt who showed her brief moments of kindness and patience when everyone else talked over her or shut her out and treated her as a nuisance, so she turned to him as a child might, clinging to any semblance of acceptance. 

It wasn’t Matt who risked then saved her life, and then bothered to ask her how she was doing and touch her shoulder in a motel room crammed with surveillance equipment and Delta Force lugs. 

It wasn’t Matt who threatened to blow her brains out if she didn’t sign her soul away, and did so with such tenderness, like it pained him to have to strong-arm her, when she should have been willing to listen to his polite request simply because he made one. 

This is what Kate keeps coming back to, what kept her a nervous wreck for months, can still make her shiver and her palms prickle with sweat: Alejandro could have beaten her or worse to get her to submit to him. She knows what he’s capable of, she’s traced his career as meticulously as the trail of carnage he’d left behind him would allow. Killing her after she’d signed that goddamn document would have been safer than risking Kate might change her mind, torpedo her career rather than let him and Matt get away with it. She sometimes still gets phantom pains where his bullets bruised her ribs on the Mexican side of the tunnel. 

Instead, Alejandro chose to menace her with such kindness, and she would not forgive him that. 

Climbing the greasy pole, leveraging the Juarez op and Christ knows what other horror shows to his best advantage, Matt must have used up and discarded a lot of people along the way. Even while she was smarting from how she’d been used, it did not escape Kate that Matt never talked about Alejandro as anything but a tool, his ‘bird dog.’ A weapon to be used when it was useful, when it was needed, and cast aside when it became too politically sensitive for a top-flight Company man. 

Bringing down a high-ranking CIA poster boy was impossible. But his hired assassin, agent, fixer, chief cook and shit-stirrer, unprotected even by US citizenship yet deeply implicated in some of the US government’s dirtiest deeds, the man who knows many secrets and has served his purpose – it was only a matter of time before that man wound up dead or in the hands of one law-enforcement agency or another. 

The door opens, admitting a burst of chatter from a nearby office. Startled, instantly mad with herself for getting caught up in her memories, Kate stands up. She doesn’t want him looking down at her in her chair when he comes in. She winces inside every time she remembers him telling her she reminded him of his young, dead daughter. 

The four years which have elapsed since Juarez have not changed him as much as Kate speculated they might, given what years they must have been for him. The bruised-looking skin around his eyes is maybe a shade darker, the hair on his chin and temples is dusted with more gray. He still favors linen suits which wrinkle in the heat and dark-colored shirts, charcoal and maroon this time. 

His expression does not change when he recognizes her. Kate did not expect it would, feels stung nevertheless that he can control himself so well. He blasted apart her life – seeing her again should have more of a visible impact on him. 

“Kate Macer,” Alejandro acknowledges her, his voice as soft as she remembers it. 

Kate makes herself look away from him, past him, to the uniformed cop at his side. “You have the paperwork?” she asks. 

She will not acknowledge what everybody knows, that she and this prisoner share history, in the presence of others. She’s had to fight tooth and nail to even get this assignment, only managing to persuade her new boss because she has personal experience of the best way to carry out a prisoner transfer with the Federales in Mexico.

Matt Graver would have made sure he had plausible deniability. Alejandro has become an embarrassment to him, so Kate wasn’t surprised when she learned there would be no trial, at least not in the US. “Let the Mexicans try him, if they want,” her boss said, and everyone pretended not to know Alejandro would pass from the Federales straight to the cartel, who would wash away everyone’s embarrassment in blood. Just another mutilated corpse in the still-violent streets of Juarez, for all that cross-border crime statistics are down of late. 

Kate signs and initials forms, keeping her prisoner in sight but not looking at him directly. He waits, hands cuffed behind his back, head tipped back slightly as though to catch the low sun on his face. Only red shadows reach inside the room. He still has a way of being, so still, saying nothing, drawing the eye without revealing anything. Kate wonders for the umpteenth time if she is the only one so drawn to him or it’s everyone. If she’s just the only one stupid enough to let how he affected her show.

They do not speak in the car or upon arrival at the motel which will serve as an overnight discreet-rather-than-safe house. Kate has the Marshals and Albuquerque PD within easy reach, but she insisted on keeping the whole op low-key. Alejandro was unfailingly courteous with her, even when he threatened her, even when he shot her he could have shot to kill and chose not to. Kate suspects he won’t cause her problems of the usual kind: trying to fight her or escape. Obvious isn’t his style, and she’s had a lot of time to think about him and how he functions. 

Once inside the room, with the curtains drawn and the door locked, Alejandro ignores her, scans the room for hidden nooks and possible exit points, a habit shared by LEOs and bandits. 

“Turn around,” Kate says, holds up her handcuff key in response to his look. 

Alejandro presents her with his back and cuffed hands without comment. Hands free, he bypasses the double bed and sits down on the couch, legs crossed, head back and eyes closed, as though he is relaxing after a long day at work. He hasn’t taken off his jacket: he’s not going to try anything right away. 

Suddenly Kate wishes to speak to him, not really surprised by the welling-up inside her, annoyed by it nonetheless. She wants Alejandro to pay attention. She wants him to hear her. To ask him why he came to her apartment that early morning, why did he bother? Did he want to see her again, one more time? Test her and see how much more she could take? Did it amuse him to gauge her reactions, her pathetic resistance to his demands, or was that the only thing which got through to the efficient numbness in him? 

The one thing Kate hasn’t been able to figure out: how to compress the last four years into one short speech which would convey everything she’s been through, everything Alejandro left her with. If the cartels made him, he made her, and Kate figured out early into her post-Juarez life that it’s the personal aspect which defines revenge. One cannot call it vengeance unless a personal hurt is soothed thereby. 

If Kate could have her druthers, she’d skin him alive and rip his eyeballs out with her fingernails. She would eat his heart. She and he are different – _not a wolf_ , he said, as though wolf and not-wolf are the only options – but she would be as violent with him as he never quite let himself be with her. 

Barring that, she has thought long and hard about how to make Alejandro’s calm façade crack. How to exorcise him and tie off this constant bleeding inside her, in her mind. 

Kate takes off her holster, lays it on the side table by the door. Alejandro’s eyes remain closed, but she knows he heard the click of leather-sheathed metal on plywood. 

Then Kate bends and unlaces her boots. She favors pantsuits and button-down shirts these days, but for this assignment she resurrected her old boots, found a pair of cargo pants to tuck into them and a loose T-shirt. She wanted Alejandro remembering her as she was, rather than seeing her as she is, as he made her. She couldn’t do anything about her hair, she’s worn it in a shoulder-long bob for about two years, but the illusion is as close to perfect as Kate could make it. 

Barefoot, she climbs up and stands on the bed. She does not look at Alejandro as she unscrews the smoke detector from the ceiling, as though he were not the most dangerous man she’s ever known and her gun weren’t lying on a table not ten paces away. The ceiling is high, even perched on the bed Kate has to stretch up on tiptoe, which makes her tee and pants ride up, lifting her breasts, exposing her ankles and belly. Just as she planned. 

When the smoke detector is detached and in her hand, she lowers her arms, catches her balance on the bed before climbing down, and looks over at the couch.

He is watching her. Kate hopes the sense of incipient triumph she feels doesn’t show on her face. 

Kate sits cross-legged on the bed, leaves the smoke detector on the bedspread beside her, and fishes inside her pocket. The ritual is reassuring, small actions stabilizing the universe: cellophane, carton packet, crinkly silver paper, the first fresh cigarette rolled between Kate’s thumb and finger, the filter between her lips, the _click click spark_ of a lighter, the first mouthful of smoke, the tip smoldering to brief life before turning to ash. 

Kate puts away her cigarettes and lighter, takes another deep drag, squints at Alejandro through the smoke. 

“Want one?” 

She holds up her hand, thin cigarette held between long, slim fingers. He held her wrist, that dawn in her apartment, didn’t want to risk taking her hand in his. 

Alejandro doesn’t so much shake his head as he moves his jaw slightly from right to left. 

“Want to watch TV? Order something to eat?” Like this is all perfectly normal, and he’s just another prisoner in her custody. 

When he finally speaks, his voice remains quiet, level. “What is your objective here, Kate?”

Kate taps ash on the bedside table. Alejandro was never much a one for questions, deflecting hers sat more comfortably with him. If he’s asking her anything, it’s because he chooses to dance with her for the moment.

“Tomorrow morning I’m due to take you to Mexico. We’ll have two Marshals as escort. A little convoy. You’ll be handed over to the Federales at the Juarez Palace of Justice at noon.” She cannot resist a brief smile: someone has a twisted sense of poetic justice, wanting Alejandro moved across state lines, as if New Mexico weren’t a border state. “Think of it as a homecoming.”

“ _You_ are taking _me_ to Juarez.” More a statement than a question: he doesn’t need to hear anything said more than once. 

Kate nods, smokes. 

Alejandro looks amused. “You volunteered. Not everyone gets that luxury. You should not take everything so personally, Kate.” 

She wants to rear back as from a physical blow, jump up and pummel him, scream. Instead she takes a deep, clean breath, then an even deeper drag on her cigarette. The filter begins to smolder, she grinds it out on the bedside table. She can cause damage same as everyone else.

“Fuck you, Alejandro.” _I am doing what I have to survive_ , she doesn’t say. _Like you did. Only you didn’t think me capable of it._

He smiles, looking at her sideways. She’s pitching a fit, and he’s indulging her. 

Kate stands, brushes down her pant legs briskly. The ancient carpet is rough under her bare feet. 

“So, you don’t want to eat and you don’t want to watch TV. I’m assuming you’re not going to sleep.” 

He’s looking away from her, at the blank wall above the dark TV set. She’s ceased to interest him already. 

“Want to get laid?”

Now he looks at her and keeps looking at her. His posture and expression do not change. Kate resists the urge to fiddle with the edge of her T-shirt. She grabs it with both hands, pulls the shirt off over her head. Her bra is white cotton: anything fancier would be too obvious. 

“Kate.” He doesn’t say anything more, shakes his head at her, more like he’s wondering if she’s gone mad than like he’s refusing her. 

“Don’t tell me it never crossed your mind.” 

Kate unhooks her bra, drops it on the floor by her shirt. Alejandro’s eyes drift down from her face, and she breathes in deeply when his gaze lingers on her. He uncrosses his legs, emboldening her.

“You like living in the past,” Kate pursues as she approaches him, slowly, keeping her hands in plain sight. “Settling old scores.” 

Two more steps, and she straddles him on the couch, her hands on the backrest, his hands still by his sides. She won’t risk touching him until she knows for certain she calculated this right. She’s looking a little down at Alejandro from her new vantage point, his eyes level with her chin, but she doesn’t kid herself she can crowd him. A half-naked woman is only less vulnerable than a fully-naked woman would be, and her gun is on the table by the door. 

“Go on,” Kate whispers, furious at herself for the catch in her voice. She planned this, she didn’t think ( _yes she did_ ) it would get to her so much. That _he_ would get to her, again. “Just keep your hands below my neck.”

Alejandro exhales, not quite a chuckle, then his mouth is on her breast, his scruff tickling her, his tongue curling around her nipple. 

Kate closes her eyes and bites her lip while he sucks on her. She won’t give him the satisfaction of moaning so soon, even as she grinds herself on his lap, feeling how a man who’s deadened so much of himself can still get hard in a trice. She keeps reminding herself that any man with a healthy circulatory system would respond the same way to what she’s doing. Another part of Kate wants to throw back her head and crow: he’s wanted her, thought about her like this. He nearly got her killed more than once, spared her every time, confused, unsettled, and distracted her. 

Kate rubs herself against Alejandro, uncaring if she seems desperate, she’s not looking for tenderness. Doesn’t want his particular brand thereof, a thin mask for the violence in him. 

Alejandro grabs her ass with both hands and grinds their bodies together. Only then does Kate put her fingers in his hair, gripping, so she can kiss him, put her tongue in his mouth. He challenges the invasion, of course, presses her to him and kisses her back. Kate takes a moment to process the feel of him, all that strong bulk against her, before she jerks her head back and looks Alejandro in the eye.

“I’ll be on top.” She offers him no options.

He goes along with it, which Kate both relishes and resents. He’s letting her take the lead, but his compliance chafes her. She wants him to do something unexpected to wrest back control of the situation. Something she would not resent, something to leave her breathless yet unbruised. 

Soon she’s riding him, hard and fast, faster than she’d like. She’s thought about this too much, couldn’t wait to have him under her, his hands on her hips, her hands supporting her against his chest. He still wears his wedding ring, keeps it on when all else is gone, naked. Kate can feel the warm metal against her flesh. 

With a deep gulp of air, Kate makes herself stop moving, a rolling wave bearing her up and down, and up and then slowly down again, until she’s resting smack against him, his cock fully sheathed in her, his pubic hair tickling her. 

“Do I remind you of your daughter now?” Kate demands, her chest heaving with effort. 

For as long as she lives, she’ll never know a purer victory than this: Alejandro’s face, his eyebrows drawn together in a scowl, his mouth twitching. Revulsion, anger, sadness, lust. A visible reaction, before he can control it. 

Alejandro’s hand shoots up and grabs Kate’s jaw, a sharp slap of skin and bone, wrenching her whole upper body closer to him. Kate feels pressure in her jaw, but no pain, yet. Digging her short nails into the flesh of his chest, with her other hand she smacks at his wrist, his hand holding her face, and after a long moment he lets go. They’re both breathing like sprinters, staring at each other. 

Kate lifts herself off Alejandro, rolls over and comes up at the foot of the bed. Another moment’s eye contact, then she turns her back on Alejandro, supporting herself against the bedframe, her knees apart, on the mattress. 

“Come on,” she snaps without looking at him. She won’t beg. 

He ignores or forgets that she said not to touch her above her neck. He’s already touched her like that. He’s inside her at once, before she can inhale and exhale, and he grabs a handful of her hair. Kate gasps as her head snaps back, but he’s not pulling to tear or maim, only to remind her. Remind her who he is and what he’s capable of. 

Kate never used to think of herself as a masochist, and maybe that’s not the right word either, just as ‘obsession’ doesn’t quite cover her fixation with this man. As Alejandro fucks her without any of his former restraint, her hair wrapped around his fist and his face pressed against the side of her neck, Kate knows she’s never going to allow herself something like this again. Alejandro is heavy, leaning his torso against her back, but his arm around her waist supports her, so Kate lets go of the bedframe with one hand, all the better to touch herself with, while Alejandro fucks her like he hates her and like he can’t get enough of pleasing her. 

Her orgasm comes on in waves, lifting her higher and higher before it swallows her whole. His hand in her hair holds her steady, but she turns her head an inch, as far as she can, to press her face to Alejandro’s, her cheek to his brow, her mouth by his right eye, while he kisses her shoulder, grazes it with his teeth, his mouth soft and wet and rough with stubble, always the extremes in him. Kate gasps and keens loudly, not even trying to swallow her pleasure. It feels devastating, like she won’t recover. She doesn’t say his name. She doesn’t. She’s sure of that.

Alejandro doesn’t say anything when he comes and his whole body sags over hers. Wincing at the sudden pain in her wrist, Kate lets go of the bedframe, lets Alejandro’s weight pull her down to the mattress. She only allows herself to lie still with her eyes closed and breathe in deep five times, in and out, Alejandro’s arm heavy over her torso and his leg covering hers like an iron restraint, before she’s pushing and shoving and dragging herself away from him, upright and off the bed. 

Alejandro rubs a hand over his face, the _scritch scritch_ of his beard against his palm louder than their labored breaths, dissonant now that they’re no longer fucking. Kate’s knees are wobbly, she feels very tender between her legs, she can’t stop panting and sweating, and she needs to pee. She hopes to hell her IUD doesn’t fail her now, of all times. 

Kate no longer wears a rubber band on her wrist, a trick her second, more attentive therapist suggested to help combat invasive thoughts ( _Alejandro in her kitchen, pressing her own service weapon under her chin, wiping away her tears_ ). She imagines snapping one against her wrist, brings back the sharp sting, then the deeper, smarting pain. The sense-memory pulls the pieces of her together, so she can scoop up her pants from the floor where Alejandro dropped them, her underwear still inside the pants, and pull both on. Then her tee, she can’t bother with her bra or shoes, too many fiddly bits for the time at her disposal. Alejandro is rousing himself, in a moment he’ll remember the discarded smoke detector on the bed or maybe on the floor, if they knocked it off in their grapple. He could easily brain Kate with it, not that she’s incapable of aiming straight when startled and knocked off balance. 

Kate grabs her gun and covers Alejandro with it, her back to the door. He sits on the edge of the bed facing away from her, half turns to look at her over his shoulder. Even naked and sweaty, the level calmness of his gaze gives Kate pause. He’s still letting her have the upper hand. 

“Get dressed,” she says, her chest still heaving a little, her breath annoyingly labored. “We’re leaving.”

“Your friends won’t be here till morning. They’ll wonder where you went.”

Kate barks a laugh: coming with him inside her seems to have given her no immunity to his presence. He can still blow her off course then tug her back with a word, a look. The bastard. 

“You never did me the courtesy of cluing me into your plans.” She takes a step into the room, gun still trained on him, kicks Alejandro’s discarded jacket toward him. “Jacket, pants, shirt. Never mind your shoes. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

His shoes are loafers without laces, and Albuquerque PD kept his belt. Kate doesn’t think he would try to strangle her anyway, but she won’t give him an advantage since she’s barefoot. Whatever he was while Matt had a use for him, that’s all over. Kate figures Alejandro will let this play out and see where it leads them. 

She keeps her gun trained on Alejandro while he dresses. He moves slowly, at his leisure, smooths down his shirt and tucks it in with care. Kate bites back the urge to command him to hurry. When he’s dressed, she cuffs his hands behind his back and marches him to the car, their bare feet quiet on the cooling pavement. Kate leaves her cell phone and ear piece in the room. She won’t need to keep in touch with the planned escort, would rather they didn’t interrupt her and Alejandro’s journey.

Dawn is just beginning to break when they reach the Texas border, the horizon heather and lavender, clouds the color of nighttime hiding the huge desert stars from sight. Kate drives, Alejandro handcuffed in the passenger seat. She’s more comfortable having him beside her than behind her. The irony is briefly amusing before she focuses on convincing Border Patrol, who were informed of the prisoner transfer scheduled for later that day, to let her through without an escort. Kate shows them the paperwork giving her custody of Alejandro Gillick, insists the border guards not call the Federales to escort her, lets the implication of the Mexican cops’ proverbial corruption work in her favor. 

The BP’s nightshift commander leans against Kate’s lowered window and eyeballs Alejandro, who looks blandly out through the windshield, across the light-strung bridge, his stillness lending him an air of danger rather than innocence. 

“I’m not happy letting you take him across on your own, ma’am,” the commander tells Kate. As much an ass-covering maneuver as an expression of concern for her: if something happens to her, he’ll be able to say he advised her not to go. “It’s a war zone over there, especially at night.”

Kate forces herself not to smile, not to flirt. She’s not trying to talk her way out of a speeding ticket. “I appreciate that, sir, but your people can’t leave their posts, and I prefer to do it like this. I’ll be back before your shift changes.” 

She prays that he doesn’t lean further inside the car, and see her and Alejandro’s bare feet. Incongruous details like that can blow an entire op. Weird enough that Kate, a woman alone, has her large, male prisoner in the passenger seat. 

Finally, fucking _finally_ , the guy moves away from the car and waves them through, his mouth a crooked slash of disapproval. 

Once across the bridge and out of sight of the Mexican and American border posts, Kate takes the first side road heading east, the blushing horizon over hills like black paper cutouts before her. Juarez is a dark mass to her right, dotted with streetlights. No distant gunfire can be heard so late at night, so early in the morning. The beast sleeps, hunched in on itself.

Half an hour later, the road having left Juarez behind before curving south then southeast, Kate pulls over onto the scrubby desert lapping against the tarmac. She pulls her gun out of her holster as she opens her door, rounds the car in front so she can keep an eye on Alejandro – his eyes keep pace with her – then she’s got his door open and is motioning him outside with the gun. 

He’s awkward pulling himself out of the car with his hands handcuffed behind his back. Finally they face each other, standing barefoot on hard-packed desert soil, very cold from the nighttime drop in temperature. The sunrise bathes their profiles, so neither has the advantage of the sun blinding the other. Kate studied an area map carefully the day before, choosing a good spot for this. 

“Kate, what are you doing?” It must rankle with him to ask her something twice, but his voice remains calm, his expression almost neutral. Almost. She has managed to puzzle him.

Kate holds up the tiny handcuff key, then flings it away from them, into the scrubby desert. It falls with a jingle, loud in the dawn stillness. 

“I’m giving you a chance. You may end up a headless corpse hanging from an overpass, but I’m not delivering you to them for that.” Her mouth is dry, she tells herself that’s why she has to pause before she gives in to her urge and repeats herself. “I’m _not_ doing that.”

She knows and he knows that, even so close to the city, the desert may finish him before anyone finds him, friend or foe.

She knows and he knows that she let herself be manipulated the first time, and now, despite her assuming control in Albuquerque, she’s still fulfilling all of his expectations. 

Alejandro’s chin dips, he considers the cold dust beneath his feet before he looks up at Kate without raising his head. Measuring her. 

“Still not a wolf.” 

Kate nearly shoots him then: a single bullet to the gut, and he’d be a long time dying. Long enough that help might come along before he bled out. 

She raises her gun, her eyes never leaving his face. The cold desert air nips at her through her thin T-shirt, hardening her nipples. Alejandro’s gaze does not waver from her face, undistracted by her body or the gun trained on his center of mass. If he hadn’t let himself go with her not three hours earlier, if she’d never seen him start awake from a nightmare, Kate would have no choice but to conclude he’s inhuman. 

“This is the third time I’ve pointed a gun at you since the tunnel,” she says, her voice barely shaking. “Do you hear that?” She jerks her head at the huge sky and land all around them, the sun’s first rays spilling over the pair of them, gilding their dark centers. “The sound of the world not ending.” She realizes, even as she says it, that she sounds like him.

Alejandro half-smiles. “If I were you…”

She cuts him off. “If you were me and I were you, you’d be dead.” 

She lets that sink in. Alejandro gives no sign of acknowledging the hit, but Kate knows it’s landed. She _knows_ , just as she knew she never would have handed him over to be killed, even before she let him inside her, even before he sat in her kitchen or shot her in that tunnel or told her to keep her eye on the time. He must want to die, or he might have overcome what few scruples he has and snapped her neck when they were in bed together. He’s had his revenge and lacks a purpose after Matt discarded him, but Kate will not be his judge or executioner. It’s not who she was before he broke her, and it’s not this cobbled-together self she is now. 

They keep watching each other as Kate gets behind the wheel, does a U-turn across the deserted road, and drives off, her gun on the passenger seat, the leather upholstery still warm to her chilled hand. In the rearview mirror, blinded by the sun rising behind her, she spies Alejandro walk deeper into the desert scrub, heading straight for the handcuff key. He will find it, Kate has no doubt. He has no money, weapon or means of transportation, not even a pair of shoes. But. He will not be bitten by a rattlesnake or die of dehydration and sunstroke or be handed over to the cartel by a passing motorist. 

He may come after her. That is his choice, given to him by Kate, as he once gave her a choice. 

Ten minutes away from the bridge, Kate pulls over again and pees, squatting behind her car, in full view of the desert and the border wall, hidden from the road and the waking, stirring city of Juarez. She laughs to think how orgasmic her sigh of pleasure in her release must sound. She’s been dying for a whiz since Albuquerque, couldn’t afford the distraction till she’d parted ways with Alejandro.

Alejandro, who may be heading deeper into Mexico or may be coming back the way they came from even as she shuffles upright and pulls up her pants, for Kate cannot begin to imagine his strategy for escape, where he may turn to for aid or shelter.

She gets back in her car, lights a cigarette, and makes for the illusory safety of the border. The sun is high enough now to heat the desert floor and the tarmac. Sweat begins to drip down Kate’s back as she drives. In her head, she is composing her letter of resignation. They probably won’t prosecute her for letting the prisoner escape, not when his very existence is an embarrassment to so many people, Kate being the least important and least powerful of them all. 

Either way, Kate cannot remain in law enforcement. She cannot stay as she has been. Every choice requires a new stitching together. She signed her soul away, and she can’t ever have it back. As she drives away from the sunrise, with no idea of what she’ll do once her resignation is accepted, her heart rate is steady, her breath soughs in and out and in. She looks forward to a shower, a meal, and a beer once she’s back across the border. She feels less weighed down by her choices than she’s felt since long before Juarez. She knows the feeling won’t last, but for the moment it’s enough.


End file.
